Photograph Source: Sgt. Jeffrey Anderson – OGL 1

The major public opinion survey institutions in the US (Pew Research, Gallup, and others) and the UK (YouGov UK, Ipsos UK, and others) are telling the same story. The citizens of both countries are fed up with ruling class institutions. The decline in public trust began to set in during the first decade, the 1980s, of neoliberalism, a policy reset that depleted social services and extinguished the very idea of socialism (UK) or social democracy (US).

Drawing on my recent book, I argue that the real essence of a democracy is not about simply having elections and allowing voting, and even in this regard, turnouts in the UK and US are dismal. Far more important is the degree to which the government acts, as Lincoln so aptly put it, as an institution of the people, by the people, and for the people – i.e., provides for the general welfare.

In a modern capitalist state, according to the sociologist Max Weber, state legitimacy can be understood as moral authority of the political order. It rests most firmly on the public’s acceptance of the legal-rational system of governance, formal and informal. But elements not strictly based on such an order, such as the charismatic personality of leaders, also may help create the basis of state legitimacy. Populist leaders like Trump heavily rely on charisma to win the loyalty of their voters. Weber also argued that traditional values, particularly those derived from the Protestant ethos such as attitudes about hard work, discipline, and obedience to authority, establish the social psychological underpinnings of state legitimacy.

When governing and other state institutions fail to satisfy the broad public, they lose their moral authority. Once they fall, i.e., forfeit their legitimacy, as in the political interpretation of the royal Humpty Dumpty, their regimes cannot be put back together even with the most severe use of police and propaganda methods of repression at hand. A deep-seeded legitimacy crisis brings radical change, led either by the right or the left, not by the center. The US and UK have been moving in a chaotic way toward a collapse of liberal democracy, just as the USSR experienced a collapse of state socialism.

The breakdown of public trust in UK and US state institutions is abundantly evident. For decades, polls have shown a continuing decline in public respect for the ruling establishment (the courts, the legislative bodies, mainstream media, corporations, the criminal justice system, elite universities, and other powerful institutions). Unlike the US, Britain came out of WWII with a generally more social democratic and Keynesian orientation, which lasted up to the 1970s, after which the major parties began to implement forms of neoliberal austerity similar to the US deployment.

Neoliberalism has unraveled the democratic system that had been evolving since the New Deal. One startling sign of the breakdown of public order was the right-wing assault on Congress in January 2021, instigated by then-outgoing president Donald Trump. Beyond the particulars of whether Trump had been cheated of victory in the 2020 election, the riot (call it an insurrection if you will) can be viewed as the culmination of long-simmering distrust and anger toward government by various groups and individuals, mainly on the right. By 2024, public trust of governing institutions had reached a near all-time low in the post-war period.

In that year, Gallup found a new low, 28%, in its tracking of American adults who believe that democracy is working in the country. Of late, Democrats are hardly more trusting of the federal government, 35%, than the Republicans, 11%.

A 2022 study by the Carnegie UK Trust found that 73% of Englanders did not trust the UK government. At the same time, 41% believed democracy was not working, and 76% thought that MPs were not making positive changes in their lives. An overwhelming majority, 89%, considered the UK government (then under Boris Johnson) to be seriously lacking in honesty and integrity. Lower-income groups, those most damaged by the retreat from social democracy, registered the highest levels of dissatisfaction.

In recent years, Britons overall have registered record levels of distrust in politicians, parties, and government ministers along with real estate agents and journalists. Between 2014 and 2024, a British study found that Britons with low or no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76%. Those living in Nordic countries, on the other hand, which remain strong welfare states, express high levels of trust in government.

In parallel fashion, implicating their adoption of neoliberal economic policies, Britons’ distrust of governing and economic institutions and politicians and their overall negative sense of well-being has grown significantly since the turn of the 21st century. The relatively weak organic character of British and American democracy in terms of social distribution corresponds to diminished state legitimacy, which is documented in several studies of public trust in state institutions.

Of all public institutions in America surveyed by Gallup in 2024, the lowest regard is held for the one body that symbolizes the essence of a representative democracy, the legislature. Gallup found that trust in Congress registered a “great deal” or “quite a lot” for a total of a mere 9% of respondents. Trust in the presidency registered 26%, the Supreme Court 30%, newspapers 18%, television news 12%, and internet........

© CounterPunch